Last week consulting firms Above the Law and Good2BSocial released their joint Social Law Firm Index ranking the Am Law 50 law firms’ social media presence. Ranking was compiled in terms of:

• Reach – “total number of unique people who had an opportunity to see the firm’s content.”
• Engagement – “actual interaction with the firm’s content via social media.”
• Owned media – “An assessment of the firm’s own site (including microsites) based on, among other things, the proportion of non-promotional content, frequency of updates, and shareability of content.”

Access to the Index is free, but you will need to . . . [more]

Always nice to see comments from blog readers. They are the voice at the other end of the telephone line, the question from the Bench. They reassure you that you are not talking to yourself.

Even if the comment you elicit is only that you are being “tiresome”, as my post did last week, at least someone has gone to the trouble of putting fingers to key board.

My posts are not really “rants against mediation” but rants in support of the preservation of affordable judicial ajudication, as an option.

I stress the word “option”. I am not calling for . . . [more]

The Manitoba Court of Appeal recently held, in Ducharme v. Borden, 2014 MBCA 5, that electronic evidence did not require expert support for a judge to deal with its admissibility.

We do not endorse the judge’s view that electronic media evidence is of no value unless supported by expert evidence. Expert evidence is limited to information which is likely outside the experience and knowledge of a judge or jury.(para 15)

On the other hand, the issues with such evidence did not make it a matter for judicial notice, either.

While the burden of authenticating evidence for admission was . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada released a decision this week in Hryniak v. Mauldin which revamps the judicial approach towards summary judgments in Ontario. The decision replaces the previous decision by the Ontario Court of Appeal in Combined Air Mechanical Services Inc. v. Flesch, a special five-judge panel to hear five appeals over Rule 20 which then created a “full appreciation test” for summary judgment motions.

The reason for the detailed analysis of summary judgment motions in Ontario largely stems from changes to the Rules of Civil Procedure in 2010 which were intended to make civil litigation more affordable . . . [more]

Spending time at a law school allowed me to see something very disturbing; law students are actively and deliberately told by law schools to expunge all social media activity.

The clear message to students is: Do Not Have Any Web-Presence Whatsoever.

Given this message, it’s no wonder that most Canadian lawyers view social media with fear and take no part in it. It also explains the shocked looks when I asked my class to create Twitter and LinkedIn accounts – then use them for class participation. Oh the horror!

Imagine if I had asked them to create blogs!

In my . . . [more]

Access to justice is a quasi-constitutional right in Quebec where the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms guarantees “a full and equal, public and fair hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal.” However, numerous stakeholders, including many in the legal community share a growing concern that access to justice is increasingly posing challenges to those who need it, and obstacles such as time, expense and representation stand in the way of securing this right for all Quebec citizens.

The legal profession is about to start shrinking. That’s the conclusion to be drawn from the United States, anyway, where law firms continue to downsize associates and even partners, and where both law school application and first-year enrollment levels are lower than they’ve been since the 1970s. Canada hasn’t yet experienced such drastic outcomes, but the rising number of graduating law students who can’t find articling positions should be considered a warning alarm of similar trouble.

There’s reason to believe that the total size of the legal profession is shortly going to plateau, and perhaps even reverse. Why? Because work . . . [more]

This week I’ll be attending the Manitoba Bar Association’s annual Midwinter Conference in Winnipeg. The conference provides lawyers with the full 12 hours of mandatory continuing professional development (MCPD), including 1.5 hours that meet the Ethics, Professionalism and Practice Management requirement, but that’s not why I attend.

In this age of webinars, online courses and individualized learning, I look forward to being in a learning environment with other lawyers, one that invariably includes time allotted for discussion and questions. Often I find I’ll learn as much from the feedback from other participants as I have from the formal presentations. . . . [more]

An article in this week’s Law Times notes another court decision, this time in Ontario, approving substitute service by Facebook. In other words, counsel showed the court that there was no other reasonable way of getting the documents to the party to be served, and that sending to FB was likely to reach the party.

The author says that this should be the norm.

The requirement for hand-delivered document service, while historically sensible, is somewhat archaic in this electronic age. Successful service should be all about making sure that the person is aware of the document. For those of us

. . . [more]

I’m again teaching at the University of Ottawa Law School during its unique January term in which students take one course for three hours per day. We discuss how the practice of law is irreversably transforming and how they’re going into the worse articling market in history with a pilot LPP program that is being set up for failure by Benchers who delayed the LPP decision far too long.

Layer on top of that, technology that reduces the number of lawyers needed for certain tasks, the conflict between hours targets and the “do more for less” challenge, alternative legal providers, . . . [more]

The NSA has been causing technology providers of all stripes — on-premise hardware vendors, cloud application providers, traditional software vendors — no end of headaches as the Snowden revelations continue to pile up. As a recent article by security expert Bruce Schneier outlines, the scale and impact of the NSA surveillance machine is almost beyond comprehension.

Microsoft’s GC, Brad Smith, went so far as to characterize the NSA as an “advanced persistent threat,” a industry term usually reserved to refer to sophisticated and malicious hackers backed by a foreign government. The cost to US technology providers of the NSA . . . [more]

I am seeing it increasingly commonly – newly called lawyers who set up their own shingle without working for a law firm as an associate. In part, it’s due to the changes in the market which have left a scarcity of opportunities for young lawyers, or opportunities that are otherwise undesirable. But it’s also becoming a preferred option for a generation which values creativity, personal relationships, empowerment, self-determination and entrepreneurship.

Luz E. Herrera, who launched her own solo practice in 2002, described this phenomenon in the Denver University Law Review,

The Great Recession has caused many new attorneys

. . . [more]